What If
by rachel2205
Summary: A post season 7 Spuffy fic. Buffy finds it difficult to adjust to normal life after Spike dies in the hellmouth. Some angst. An introspective fic.


What If

Buffy leaned over the sink, splashing cold water onto her face. She was tired; she always felt tired these days. She had thought things would be different now that Sunnydale was gone, now that there were so many other slayers to share the burden. But it turned out that she still had to fight, and organise, and train, and give motivational speeches – and be Buffy. The last past was proving to be the hardest.

Sighing, she reached for a towel and rubbed it across her face before lifting her gaze to the mirror. Where she saw not just her face, but _his_.

And this was a lame fantasy. Buffy sat up in bed, pulling her knees to her chest. Firstly? Spike didn't have a reflection. Secondly? If she was going to fantasise about Spike finding her, she could think of a better location than her bathroom.

She glanced at the clock. Three am. She'd been trying to sleep for a couple of hours, and had fallen back on her favourite torture, the what-if game, to pass the dead time between now and when day began and she could go back to being Buffy-who-had-lots-to-do.

What if.

What if Spike had lived. He'd clawed his way through the rubble somehow, followed her scent – no, that was gross; she knew he could smell her, but she didn't want him to be all bloodhoundy – ok, he tracked her some other way. Found her fighting a nest of vamps. Her hair would be super shiny and bouncy and she'd be fighting ninja-style, but seeing him would make her lose momentum and fall over, meaning a vamp would jump on top of her. Spike would light a cigarette with one hand and stake the vamp with the other, and grin at her through a smoke ring.

What if he _hadn't_ lived, but he came back. Totally not unrealistic. Angel had done it, and so had she. But he was all weak and kitteny and she'd nursed him. No, that was too like what she'd done with Angel. Ok, he came back and had amnesia. Kind of movie-of-the-week, amnesia, but she could work with it. And then she did something – cool or brave or sexy, it depended on her mood – and he'd just _known_ her again.

What if after he'd said he was staying in the hellmouth she'd punched him and dragged him out, because anyone could see it was caving in already and why the hell did he have to play the hero? She was sick of heroes. Sick of being one and having to be noble and give everything up just so everyone else could get their happy ending.

But that, unlike the other dreams, was too painful, because she could have made it happen. She could have hit his stupid head with her fist and carried him away with her, and Sunnydale would probably have still collapsed. Probably. It always came back to probably and that was why she hadn't done it; why she knew deep down that if she had the chance again she wouldn't either. At the same time she wished she had, and the wishing part was what made it hard, because no matter what you _knew_, you couldn't help what you wanted. They could have been on that damn bus together, and after they'd helped the wounded and buried the girls who were just too hurt to make it, she'd have said _it_ again. And this time he wouldn't have said "no you don't, but thanks for saying it."

No one else knew about that. About what she'd said, and what Spike's reply had been. She'd thought about telling Dawn. Dawn would understand, and she wouldn't try to make Buffy feel bad about it. But she couldn't tell her, because Buffy knew she'd see sympathy in Dawn's face. Sympathy because she'd realised too late what she should have known before. Sympathy because she'd left it so late that even he wouldn't accept it. And he'd died without knowing –

God.

She realised that she was clenching her jaws so tightly that her mouth ached. Three fifteen. The nights passed so slowly, and the days rushed by, rushed and blurred together into a long list of things that needed doing, sorting, arranging. Why did she have to do so much? She'd saved the world – again. Surely that earned her some kind of break, if not a five star vacation in Hawaii.

But she couldn't lie to herself. Not at three fifteen when the rest of the house was silent and she was sitting in the dark, knees pulled up to her chest and only the glow of her alarm clock for company. No. She'd got surprisingly good at being straight with herself over these last few months after – everything. She _didn't_ have to do all this. She could share out the responsibility. If she'd told the others she was taking a month off, they wouldn't have said anything. Really, they would have been _pleased_. No, the reason she kept going was because she didn't know how to stop. If she stopped she'd have to think about things.

He wasn't coming back.

It would hit her in the gut sometimes, knowing that, just as sometimes she would remember that she was never going to see her mother again and her solar plexus would explode, just as if someone had punched her there, and she'd be paralysed. The list of chores – _patrol train the girls has Dawn worked on her college application yet I should call the insurance people again surely they can't just call that an act of God and I should go to the unemployment office again maybe there'll be something better I'm so sick of fast food and its stupid uniforms maybe I should go back to college in the spring but how will I pay for anything­ _– meant she could keep moving. They swept her along until the ache subsided a little, until the next moment of reality. Without a to-do list she might just stay doubled over forever.

Luckily there were even more chores right now, because Christmas was coming up. Last year's festivities had been a non-event, really, and so they were all making more effort. Sometimes the thought of Christmas Day horrified her, feeling the absence of all the people who should be there, knowing that everyone else felt it too but forcing out smiles and reading cracker jokes. But it gave her things to do, things to shop for, and so she was grateful in a way.

Three forty five. This was just stupid. Buffy slid out of bed, swopping her vest and pyjama bottoms for a sweat top and jeans. There was still a while before daylight. Time to get some slaying in.

So she went out and killed and came home, forcing herself into exhaustion, and she passed out still in her clothes on her bed for two blank and blissful hours before her alarm beeped and it was time to go again.

And so it went on. She couldn't remember the last time she'd slept for more than a couple of hours at a stretch. She'd used up a whole tube of Touche Eclat hiding the circles under her eyes, and that stuff was expensive. She'd also lost another five pounds, which made a stone since the summer. Someone had once said you could never be too rich or too thin. Buffy didn't know about the first part, but the latter was definitely wrong. In the last year in Sunnydale she'd spent so much time fighting that her curves had all but vanished; now she looked in the mirror and saw a starved bird. Her skin was tissue paper over the sharp, thin lines of her cheekbones and shoulderblades. When she looked at the back of her hand she could see every vein. But the joke was that she'd never been stronger. Having fought the ubervamps, the regular kind were almost embarrassingly easy to kill. She could do things with her body now that she wouldn't have dreamed of a few years ago. She wondered sometimes if that meant she was really becoming the Slayer, with a capital S, as those shaman guys had intended her to be. Stretched thin across the fabric of the world, nothing but skin and bones and the hunt. Maybe that would even be better, because the ache behind her ribs might fade away along with her breasts and hips and thighs.

In the meantime she bundled up into more clothing, and if the others noticed, they didn't say anything. No one said anything these days; not about anything that mattered. That was fine by her. She didn't want to talk about any of this; it was bad enough that she had to think about these things, never mind share them. So she talked about Christmas and the weather and how training was going, and never answered "how are you?" with anything other than "fine".

It was two days to Christmas. Dawn had got the house looking nice. Dawn had found a Christmas tree and Buffy had carried it home before Xander trimmed the top and bottom so it would fit nicely in its holder, and they had put on a pretty good show of Christmas spirit. Now it was the 23rd, and Buffy had said she would go fetch the turkey from the butcher's and do a little last minute shopping.

The afternoon turned dark quickly. She moved through crowds of happy or harassed shoppers and felt nothing. Not stressed, not excited, just blank, and the sound of the crowd around her was like the roar of the ocean.

The people thinned out as she moved towards home, trickling away into eddies and ripples until the streets were empty and the Christmas lights on houses illuminated only her fragile shadow, feet tapping the frozen pavement like glass on glass.

She got to the house and stopped at the end of the path, fumbling in her pockets for her keys whilst trying not to drop her bags. The porch light was on, but the rest of the house was dark, and she felt her customary guilty relief that she was home before everyone else, meaning she could get to her room before anyone would feel the need to talk to her. She was alone.

But that wasn't quite true, she realised. There was someone sitting on the front steps, but the glare of the porch light and the way the shadows fell made it hard to see who it was. And why would anyone be sitting on her steps, anyway? It was freezing out here. Her fingers shifted, letting go of the keys and digging deeper into her pocket for her stake. Just in case.

Cautiously, she walked up the pathway, and before she was halfway there her spider senses were tingling. But not in a wigged out way. More in a - Oh God.

Buffy stopped. Her heart was suddenly pressing hard against her ribs, and she could hear her blood roaring in her ears. And the shape in the shadows shifted, but she knew it wasn't just a shape, it was –

"'Lo, love," he said softly, leaning forwards into the light, and she couldn't breathe. She just stared at him, brown paper bags almost slipping out of her arms, and she felt like she might be sick.

"Spike," she said at last, and the bags slipped from her nerveless fingers. The turkey, wrapped in greaseproof paper, skidded along the path, and she watched it slide with numb astonishment before turning her face back to the man on her steps.

"You're not real," she said with regret, as the feeling of shock began to subside, replaced with a sour ache of disappointment in her belly. "I'm imagining you." Maybe I'm really just going crazy, she thought matter-of-factly. It wouldn't be altogether a surprise.

"Not a dream, pet," he said. "If it was, I'd've said something witty by now, but as it is I'm too knackered from travelling to find you to think up any good lines." Spike's face, she noticed, wasn't like it had been in her dreams. He looked tired. Maybe nearly as tired as she did. There were dark smudges under his eyes, but more than that, his face looked worn. Like he'd been struggling for a long time. Then she glanced down at the step beside him and saw a scattered pile of Marlboros, burned down to the nub. He'd been there for a while, waiting. _I wouldn't have thought of adding cigarette butts_, she thought, absurdly, and pressing a hand to her lips she stifled something between a laugh and a sob. He was here. He was really here. Where had he been? How did he get here? But she couldn't ask that. She thought if she opened her mouth she'd start sobbing with relief and fear, and she didn't know if she'd ever stop. So instead she stood, hand pressed to her mouth, looking at Spike look at her.

He stood up, and she stiffened. She didn't know if she could bear it if he touched her. She'd melt, but not in a nice end-of-story way. She'd thaw out, and she didn't know if there'd be anything left of her if she let him back. It had taken all her self-control these last few months to hold herself together. If she let go now, she might never be in one piece again.

But Spike didn't touch her. He stepped down the path and picked up the turkey from where it had skidded into the frost-patterned lawn.

"Your turkey's a bit grass stained," he pointed out, picking it up and holding it out to her, and that was it. That was enough.

The turkey bounced back into the grass as her face pressed into the front of his duster, her arms reaching up around his shoulders, and as she breathed in the scent of leather and tobacco she sobbed, snot bubbling from her nose, and beneath her gloved hands she felt his back trembling. When she stopped crying some undeterminable time later, she looked up at him and said nothing. He looked at her gravely, lifting his hand to cup her cheek, not seeming to mind that it was smeared with tears and mucus.

"Er… Merry Christmas, pet."

She stared at him.

"_Merry Christmas_? You come back from the dead and you wish me a Merry Christmas?"

"'Tis the season," he said, shrugging, and for the first time his mouth quirked into a smile. She felt her lip trembling in amusement.

"Remember in Sunnydale? When I called you a dope? You're still a dope," she said. And before he could think of something clever to say about that, she lifted her face to his and kissed him.

The turkey lay on the grass until Christmas Eve, and was completely ruined.


End file.
